Enhancing Assessment in Higher Education: Putting Psychometrics to Work ed. by Tammie Cumming and M. David Miller (review)

Enhancing Assessment in Higher Education provides a comprehensive review of the use of psychometric properties in assessment. As stated in the preface, its purpose is to provide information that will foster faculty and university administrators' abilities to increase student learning through changes made within the curriculum and within institutional policies. Furthermore, an essential contribution of this work also provides tools and approaches to assess student learning outcomes in post-secondary education, to improve the quality of data collected, and thereby improve institutional decision-making (20).

Consisting of 10 chapters, this book is organized into three broad sections that address the attributes, assessment methodologies, and strategies to ameliorate institutional assessment. The first section includes two chapters that provide an overview of the history and evolution of assessment in higher education, along with the foundational principles of educational measurement. In chapter 1, Ewell and Cumming explore the historical basis of assessment, and how it is practiced today. Though seminal research of the study of student learning dates back to the 1970s, authors plainly admit that assessment has not been universally defined, and that it means "different things to different people" (8). In addition, Ewell and Cumming also introduce relevant terminology used throughout the book and the larger context of student learning in higher education.

Beginning in chapter 2, two terms profoundly referenced are validity and reliability. In this chapter, Harris primarily focuses on summarizing the foundational chapters of Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014), highlighting validity (the degree to which evidence support interpretation of assessment results for proposed uses), reliability and score precision (consistency of scores across replication), and fairness (universal design and absence of bias). Harris maintains that validity, reliability, and fairness provide the framework of constructing assessment instruments. However, perhaps a more accurate construct than fairness would be equity in assessment. Similar to fairness, there is a need to ensure every student succeeds regardless of his or her differences, as Montenegro and Jankowski's Equity and Assessment: Moving Towards Culturally Responsive Assessment (2017) note, that without equity in mind, evidence of learning may be obstructed and not accurately assessed to provide feedback that can improve the education of students. Nonetheless, regardless of the method, Miller and Poggio explain that assessments should provide evidence that are "well founded in validity, reliable, and are fair and equitable across subpopulations" (146).

The book transitions to the second section addressing types of assessment measures, direct and indirect, and further examine the psychometric concepts of validity and reliability of these measurements in chapters 4 and 6. Direct assessment focuses on student competencies, whereas indirect methods provide evidence about students' perceptions of their learning. In chapter 5, Nelson Lair and BrckaLorenz note that indirect assessments are means to provide context about student learning and are not meant as replacements of direct assessments. Perhaps because the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC U) is a co-publisher of this book, emphasis on the Value Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics are heavily stressed as a direct assessment method. Created by a group from various disciplines and institutions, the VALUE rubrics are used at thousands of institutions to assess a variety of student learning outcomes (63).

The concluding section of Enhancing Assessment in Higher Education consists of three chapters of how three different institutions (one bachelor, two doctoral-granting) approach institutional effectiveness on their respective campuses. The authors of these chapters begin with a contextual description of their institution, history of assessment on their campus, approach to general education assessment including the use of psychometric principles, and offer practices they found successful. Though each institution has its own approach, a common strategy was that they engaged their institutions' faculty to design the assessment plans and instruments. Curiously, however, it is not mentioned why the three institutions selected were the object of examination. Additionally, including...